Matins

¶ David Berreby writes about a intriguing phenomenon: a certain kind of terrorist is more likely to be an engineer. What kind? the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.” Not leftist, in other words. (NYT; via The Morning News)

The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.” Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? It’s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.

Economic frustration also matters, Gambetta says. In their sample of militants, there was only one homeland out of 30 in which engineers were less common: Saudi Arabia — where engineers have always had plenty of work. But “engineers’ peculiar cognitive traits and dispositions” made them slightly more likely than accountants, waiters or philosophers to react to career frustration by adopting violent, right-wing beliefs.

William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy of Engineering, is, no surprise, no fan of the Gambetta-Hertog theory. “If you have a million coin flips,” he says, “it’s almost certain that somewhere in those coin flips there will be 20 heads in a row.” The sample of militants Gambetta and Hertog used was simply too small for them to be sure they haven’t stumbled into a meaningless numerical accident, he says. The theory, according to Wulf, misrepresents what engineers are about. “A person who is rigid,” he says, “is a bad engineer.”

Okay, a bad engineer.

Lauds

¶ We’ve read through Anthony Grafton’s agreeable little disquisition on Paolo Veronese, the Inquisition, and Renaissance research into the details of Jesus’ life — did Jesus and the Apostles sit or stretch out for the Last Supper? — a couple of times, and we’re still not sure that we’ve grasped the point of it all. But we’re always charmed by Professor Grafton’s ability to make scholarship look interesting. (Cabinet; via 3 Quarks Daily)

But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries. Veronese could be forgiven, then, for thinking that he had some iconographic elbow room. In fact, though, what he encountered in Venice was something new. Presumably he knew that censors were taking more interest than they had in the past in religious paintings. What he did not—and could not—know was that scholars were beginning to look at the Last Supper in a radically new way.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith takes a moment out from banging her head against the wall — “Why Do We Keep Indulting the Fiction That Banks Are Private Enterprises” — to remark on blog entry (missing link!) by “Jay Rosen of NYU” that appears to substitute concentric circles for “frames.” Round or square, this is the kind of analysis that seeks to map and distinguish the discussible from the impermissible in general critical conversations.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

How can we change this? How can we de-nuttify the propositions that pile up in the “sphere of deviance.” Do we begin by accepting that our notion about large corporations — that, in today’s world, they’re simply joysticks for a handful of CEOs — have to fight for attention alongside the tenets of creationism?

Tierce

¶ Because 9/11 coincided with a new moon last weekend, and followed a week of turbulent weather (remember Hugh?),  thousands of migrating birds were thrown into confusion by the memorial Tribute in Light at the World Trade Center site. (Wired Science)

To navigate, birds rely on a variety of internal compass mechanisms, which are calibrated to Earth’s geomagnetic fields by sunlight, starlight and moonlight. On Sept. 11, the new moon was just two nights old, a thumbnail sliver. In such conditions, birds rely on starlight, but parts of the lower Manhattan sky were overcast.

The buildings resembled stars. Outshining them all was the Tribute in Light above Ground Zero.

Rowden estimates that 10,000 birds entered the beams, becoming confused and circling until the Municipal Art Society, working with New York City Audubon, shut the lights for 20 minutes, allowing the birds to leave. That happened five times over the course of the night.

The spotlights were not directly dangerous to the birds. Instead, risk comes from wasted time and energy needed for later.

“Birds do fly for extended periods of time. It’s not that they can’t do it. But they’re doing it to get south of here. If they spend all their time in that small area, they won’t get to good foraging habitat, and it will compromise them for later parts of their migration,” Rowden said. “But I feel that we did allow them to get out.”

Sext

¶ Kevin Hartnett reflects on the persistence of “friendships,” thanks to Facebook, beyond friendships’ natural life. (The Millions)

We all trail a line of relationships behind us as we grow older, and we all have our own standards that define when and how we let go of people who were once important in our lives (and when and how we accept being let go of ourselves). I could see why it might be rewarding or interesting or comforting to know that with Facebook you never really need to put a friendship to rest completely. But to me it’s comforting and disorienting in the way of ventilators and feeding tubes that sustain a narrow definition of life long after the real thing has run its course.

Ah, but you never know.

Nones

¶ Sudhir Hazaree Singh considers the burnished legacy of Charles DeGaulle, in Turkey of all places, at Foreign Policy. (via  The Morning News)

His political achievements notwithstanding, de Gaulle’s greatest talent was in developing and propagating myths that fortified the nation. By refusing to accept defeat in the depth of World War II and demonstrating a willingness to fight to the death to defend his homeland, he restored pride and grandeur after the disgrace of occupation. (He glossed over the fact that France was largely liberated thanks to U.S. and British armed forces; de Gaulle always preferred falsehoods that elevated the spirit to truths that debased it.) Yet, in a sense, he was France’s Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln all rolled into one — perhaps the only reason the Lincoln analogy is incomplete is that he survived multiple assassination attempts, lending him an additional air of invincibility.

[snip]

Like all great leaders, de Gaulle was a complex figure: At his worst, he was contemptuous of elected politicians, authoritarian, and egotistical. Like an ancien régime monarch, he sometimes seemed to think he was France. But he was also capable of inspiring his people to achieve great things, and this is the most important reason why he remains an international icon, with broad appeal to political leaders across the globe. The general symbolizes a conception of politics that rejects all forms of fatalism — especially when this inevitability is presented as a justification for inequality. He also represents a nostalgia for a time when leaders stood for real principles, irrespective of the pronouncements of political spin doctors. When de Gaulle’s entourage brought in a professional election manager to advise him in the run-up to the 1965 presidential election, he was promptly shown the door. Simpler times, indeed. Yet above all, de Gaulle incarnates an ideal that has taken some battering in this age of globalization and hegemony, but that will remain central to world politics in the 21st century: the desire of peoples to determine their own fate entirely free from foreign intervention — whether economic, political, or military.

Vespers

¶ Elif Batuman’s review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is a well from which we intend to drain many satisfying drafts. Indeed, her analysis of really rather odd graduate writing program priorities cleared up a number of perplexities that we didn’t even know we had — so accustomed were we to bumping up against them in the unlighted portions of the mind. (LRB; via MetaFilter )

Take Ms Batuman’s dismantlement of the two best-known writing program mantras, “write what you know” and “find your voice.” Try not to disturb the rest of the class with your snorts.

The discussion of Chief Bromden’s narrative ‘voice’ leads McGurl to a particularly ambitious defence of programme fiction (‘as rich and multifaceted a body of literary writing as has ever been’), wherein he decides to prove that the slogans ‘write what you know’ and ‘find your voice’ were enormously productive for 20th-century fiction. As it turns out, he views these catchphrases not as interchangeable exhortations to authenticity, but as philosophically opposed dictates. ‘Write what you know’ really does seem to mean ‘write what you know,’ but ‘find your voice’ actually means ‘find someone else’s voice’: thus Styron ‘found his voice’ in Nat Turner, reimagining ‘authorship as a kind of ventriloquism … which is an offence against the rule of writing what you know’.

McGurl never quite articulates the law that enjoins some writers to write what they know and others to find their voices…

[snip]

There is no arguing with taste, and there are doubtless people in the world who enjoy ‘the virtuosity of Butler’s performance of narrative mobility’. To me, such ‘performances’ are symptomatic of the large-scale replacement of books I would want to read by rich, multifaceted explorations whose ‘amazing audacity’ I’m supposed to admire in order not to be some kind of jerk.

The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love.

Compline

¶ Brent Cox decides that, in the Age of the Internet, he’s simply not going to tell anyone — digitally, anyway — about this great place for dumplings that he has discovered. No coolhunter he. (The Awl)

My personal concern is that fetishization begins to replace the actual experience. Were I to opt to fully share my fried dumpling experience with the World of Foodies, then I would take notes on the meal, photograph every element and then spend a good chunk of time composing my initial post detailing the experience and then spend more time ensuring that the post is brought to the attention of the right people. Having done that, what portion of the event is comprised of “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? And if I keep it to myself, or at least just tell friends and family about it with my actual mouth, what then is the portion of the event is “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? See also: people who attend weddings and/or concerts and watch the entire thing through the screen of their mobile phone, which is being used to record, a kneejerk mediation of experience. There is something to be said for Just Experiencing something and letting the sole record of it be your memory. It’s worked for centuries.

It’s a question of coolhunting. The verb “coolhunt” is of course now an archaic term: “so [x] (where [x] = [some date a few years before now]).” But it lives on to this day. At this point, instead of an occupation that’s a subject of a Wired feature, it’s a game we all play at home, as the Internet shifts the load-bearing structures of cool away from the William Gibson protagonists to anyone with a WordPress username. We identify objects, in situ, and tag them. It is hunting, but, coming from a family of actual hunters, it is the lamest kind of hunting because the hunters are not eating what they kill. That sneaker, those vintage eyeglass frames, and, yes, those fried dumplings are definitely cool in the context of where you find them, but they will be less so once their heads are mounted in your study. The coolhunter destroys cool just by geotagging it.

Have a Look

¶ Close Calls. (kottke.org)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 6:00 pm.